In many countries voting is mandatory and there can be twenty or thirty political parties at one time. A voter can vote for more than one person in a party or can vote for everyone in every party.
Currently votes are tabulated by hand. This is a long arduous labor intensive process which consumes time and is expensive. In some countries, like Belgium, more than a quarter of the population are paid employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs just for this voting process. Votes occur often and it is usually mandatory that each person votes at each election. There are civil penalties for failure to vote and thus the system must keep track of who has voted and who has not. Thus, any automated system should allow for the automatic issuance of a summons to people who have not voted.
Part of the requirements of the system is that it be easy to set up by nontechnical people who are not capable of adding boards to PC's and wiring networks together. Elections are usually held in school rooms or in cafeterias, but in many cases, there is no power, and the system cannot count on telephone lines or networks available to tie polling places together. The system must be very portable and easy to set up. The equipment must be stored for long periods of time and stored in a small amount of space. There must be hard copy produced from this process that will last for at least thirty days for recounts. Also, the election results must be able to returned within one day. Above all, the system must provide the population with a high degree of confidence that the results are correct. This then argues for redundancy and backups to insure the integrity of the vote.
The hard copy requirement is particularly difficult because as the voting goes on, it is mandatory that people do not see the vote and consequently, the hard copy has to be stored in a manner so that it is not viewable until the results are finished. At that point it must be easily tabulated while still preserving the secret ballot. Voters must be able to see each other and the election judges must not be able to see the voters vote.
The system must be able to be run in multiple languages. The Belgium system, for example, must run in French and Dutch, and also, in some sections of the country, in German.
It would be useful if the system had alternate uses other than the voting system so the terminals could be used for any multiple choice quiz, such as civil service exams, or driver's examinations.